ICT- a case of build it and they shall come?

There are lots of examples where information and communication technologies are being used as a tool for international development. But do we make a mistake if we think that ICT alone can solve all the developing world's problems?

Transcript

Richard Heeks: I'm sure the Internet is not going to save the planet; mobile phones are not going to save the planet, but I think we're in for a very interesting 10 or 20 years in development as a result of this wave of ICTs that are flowing into poor communities now, and really starting to arrive now, in a way that they weren't even five years ago.

Kentara Toyama: What I believe is that what technology actually does is to magnify what human beings want to do and what they're capable of doing. So if you have either a negative intent, as in the case of corrupt bureaucrats, or infinitesimal capacity as in the case of people who don't have basic education, then no amount of technology actually adds anything positive to that situation.

Rose Shuman: Something funny about the development of the Internet, has been if you read English or Spanish or Chinese, or a handful of other languages, you can pretty much find whatever you want, but if you say, read Gugerati and you want local information that pertains to your state, you actually have a pretty small set of sites you could go to, even if you could get a computer and get online. And I think for that reason India has actually had a very slow uptake on the Internet.

Few people know this, but right now, India's got about 1.2-billion people in it, and there are really only about 80-million regular users of the Internet in the entire country, which is less than 1%.

There's an assumption about modern communications technology and it goes something like this: The more of it there is, the broader its uptake, the better the world will be.

There are lots of anecdotal examples of communications technology put to good use in the cause of international development. We've detailed quite a few of them on this very program. And we'll hear a little later about another, a project called Question Box, which blends both new and very old technology in the service of the illiterate and the poor.

But beginning the program this week is Kentaro Toyama, a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr Toyama isn't anti-technology. He has a degree in computer science from Harvard, and back in 2005 he co-founded Microsoft Research India. As he tells it, he was a firm believer that ICT - Information Communication Technology - would change the world simply by its very existence, by its very take-up. But that's a position he now questions.

Kentaro Toyama: We're swimming in a world that tends to, on the whole, have positive intent and very educated population and so when we see a technology come into use, we almost always see it be used in a positive way and amplifying very capable peoples capacity. And so the conclusion we draw is that wow! We add the technology to the mix and it does something great. The problem is that there are places in the world where that natural assumption that we make about what people can do doesn't actually exist, and so if you add technology, you often see the case that nothing actually happens.

Antony Funnell: There is a buzz around technology in the developing world though, isn't there? I mean it is something that world leaders, that international institutions, they find it very easy to talk about.

Kentaro Toyama: Absolutely. I think right now the world is in a bit of a craze about for example, the potential for mobile phones to change the world. There's certainly something very unique about mobile phones, they're incredibly affordable, they allow people to do something that everybody wants to do. In 2010 I believe the number of mobile phone accounts in the world exceeded 5-billion, which is comfortably more than the total population of the world over the age of 20. And so increasingly people are saying, you know, we can use mobile phones to solve just about every social problem, including the problems of poverty.

Antony Funnell: Now in an article last year for The Boston Review entitled 'Can Technology End Poverty?' Mr Toyama drew a comparison between the high hopes still being expressed for digital and online technology and those expressed in the last century for the transformational potential of television.

Kentaro Toyama: So in the '50s and '60s, people were really excited about television, and you can imagine in a world that only had radio, that TV was a fundamentally significant technology. It was amazing what it could do. People back then used to say things like, you know, This is television and it's going to transform education; it's going to change the way that people see education; you're no longer going to have to go to classes at school, because you can have educational content beamed right into your living room. And the result since then in both the developed world as well as the developing world, is that television penetration has done very well, but just because you have a TV in your house, doesn't necessarily mean that you will be educated, in fact increasingly, studies suggest that TV is antithetical to education.

Antony Funnell: Now tell us about your direct experience in this area.

Kentaro Toyama: I used to lead a research group in India, in Bangalore for Microsoft, and what we did was to spend our time trying to understand how technology already impacts very poor communities both in rural villages as well as in urban slums. I was certainly optimistic, in the sense that I felt that we could use these powerful technologies in some way that would really help and impact very poor communities.

Antony Funnell: And what changed your mind? Was there one particular experience?

Kentaro Toyama: I wouldn't say it was a single experience, but over time, what I kept finding was that even in our successful project, the impact of the technology depended entirely on the people who were either manipulating the technology from the outside, or using the technology from the inside. In both cases, what we found was that you needed well-intentioned, competent people, using the technology in order for the technology itself to have a positive impact.

What the technology ultimately does is to kind of emphasise those things that people are already doing. So for example, if people are already engaging in a huge amount of local business and so on, then certainly the phones will help with that. At the same time, if people feel that their lives are not really changeable in a positive way, then when the technology comes, there'll see another way to kind of alleviate their daily struggles, rather than as a way to improve their life. So they might take towards entertainment, things that wouldn't necessarily directly help them in a productive capacity.

Antony Funnell: But again, getting back to that romanticised vision that we have, we expect that if you put a computer in a village, that people are primarily going to use it for, say, educational purposes, not necessarily for entertainment as we would, or for private business interests

Kentaro Toyama: I think one thing that we as relatively wealthy people see when we go to villages, is that these are communities which have such low levels of education, health care, financing and so on, that we immediately think that if we were them, we would do anything we could to get better education, better health care and so on. And what we find routinely is that when you go into these communities, people are actually reasonably content with the level of the services that they have access to. They don't think that it's a huge problem that their children have diarrhoea every other month, things that we wouldn't accept. And so when you give them technology that might have the capacity to overcome those issues, they don't necessarily jump at those opportunities.

Antony Funnell: If you follow Kentaro Toyama's logic, that technology doesn't change behaviour, it merely amplifies it, then it's not hard to imagine that at its worst, a blind devotion to the power of technology as a tool of international development, could actually lead to a widening, not a tightening, of the information and wealth divide between rich and poor.

So what's the Toyama solution?

Kentaro Toyama: I think I have kind of two overall recommendations for this line of work. One is first of all that if you're not tied to using the technology, to consider seriously whether it's the technology that will help, or whether it's some investment in human capacity that will pay off more. Then of course if you are invested in using the technology, it's to ensure that the technology isn't applied to an existing social institution that is already having positive impact. So one way to think about it is that the technology is in support of a working system.

Antony Funnell: So in that sense, technology isn't the focus, it's the tool to help, as you say, the human capacity?

Kentaro Toyama: That's exactly right.

Antony Funnell: Now a lot of money has been spent around the world over the last ten years particularly, on information communication technology as a form of aid and human advancement. That money then, I take it from what you're saying, could have been much better spent on other areas of life.

Kentaro Toyama: I think that's true in the abstract, although it's always hard to tell in development whether that money would have been available otherwise. That is to say for example, that the huge amount of money in international development now that comes from technology companies that are trying to find a way to have positive impact in the world, and it's not entirely clear that that money would have been there if they felt that technology ultimately couldn't contribute. But yes, on the whole, I think it's true that a lot of the money that's spent in international aid and international development projects, could be nudged towards investment in human beings and their capabilities, rather than into technology.

Richard Heeks: I've been working in this field for, what, about 30 years now, and we all began in a very pessimistic mode about what ICTs were going to achieve, or what ICTs couldn't achieve. We saw failures all of the time. And then about ten years ago there was this enormous wave of hype that arose, and I think we all turned very much against that and said, 'Oh no, ICTs aren't going to achieve any of these sorts of promises at all.' But I have to say in the very recent years, I'm starting to become more optimistic about what ICTs can do, and actually to do almost in and of themselves.

Antony Funnell: That's Richard Heeks, and he says he understands, but doesn't support, the Toyama line.

Professor Heeks is the Director of the Centre for Development Informatics at the University of Manchester.

Richard Heeks: We often have argued 'Oh, you need so many other things to be put in place other than a technology. You need skills, you need political change, you need regulations to change, you need mindsets to change, and so on. I think all of that is undoubtedly important, but I do get signs of organic change when ICTs arrive in a community, that the communities themselves start to find new ways of doing development as a result of ICTs coming in to those communities. So I'm sure the Internet is not going to save the planet, mobile phones are not going to save the planet, but I think we're in for a very interesting 10 or 20 years in development as a result of this wave of ICTs that are flowing into poor communities now, and really starting to arrive now in a way that they weren't even five years ago. So overall I would say slightly ironically since I'm supposed to be their level-headed academic and Kentaro is at least in his previous persona the Microsoft guy, but we might almost be sort of swapping sides, that I'm seeing more optimism perhaps than he.

Antony Funnell: That said, a recent report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, entitled the 2010 Information Economy Report, was cautious about drawing too strong a connection between Information Communication Technology (ICTs) and development and income generation. In fact, it seemed to support Mr Toyama's contention that the adoption of ICTs can actually exacerbate already existing disparities within communities. Now Professor Heek's centre contributed to that report. So what does he make of that caution?

Richard Heeks: I think of course it is quite rightly so, because for one thing, everything is so new. We used to talk about the productivity paradox - there's this famous phrase in America that new technology appears everywhere except in the productivity figures, and we used to kind of have an equivalent I think of the development paradox, that more and more money is being spent on ICTs, more and more people have access to ICTs, well where is this actually appearing in the development figures. And I think the answer is the same as it was for the productivity paradox: the impact is there, but it's going to take time to really show through in the development figures, right?

So I think at the micro level, you can really see things. The UN Information Economy Report is taking an overview, and is quite rightly saying, Well, at a kind of global level, we're looking right across the whole of the developing world, it's hard to exactly pinpoint and say, Well this amount of GDP has been increased by the introduction of new technologies and so on. But I wouldn't the other way and say Well, we're not seeing anything, because we've certainly got signs of millions of people being affected these days by ICTs, job creation, income generation and so on.

[Indian phone advertisement]

Antony Funnell: Figures from a KPMG survey last year found that India and China were leading the world in terms of the take-up of mobile phone transactions, for things like banking and purchasing. And it's now estimated that there are around 600-million mobile phone users in India.

Mobile phones have taken off on the sub-continent in part because they're relatively cheap to use, and they don't require a great deal of literacy, unlike the Internet, which as we heard at the beginning of the program, is actually being accessed by only around 1% of the population.

But there are many people, the poor of the poor, who have no access to either a mobile phone or a computer.

Now a few years ago, California-based Rose Shuman looked at the Internet, the vast bounty of potential information available online, and then looked at the impoverished of India and wondered how she could help the poor make the most of the new Information Age. Her solution, was to combine both high-tech and low-tech in a single service. And she called it The Question Box.

Rose Shuman: The idea is actually rather simple. It's a metal box and it goes up on a wall, and it has two buttons. One is green and one is red. And if you walk up to the box and push the green button, it will initiate a telephone call to someone who speaks your local language and is most often in front of a computer that's attached to the Internet. And what it is, is a portal to rural villages and urban slums, to the world of the Internet in a way that just about everyone can access, in which you have one person who can speak both the local language and search online, basically mediating all the content on the Internet for small populations that don't have to go any further than a stroll to their corner store to get information.

Antony Funnell: And what's important, or what stands out with this project is the simplicity of it, isn't it?

Rose Shuman: Yes. You know, the informal model that we've kept in mind is designing for grandma, and basically the idea that technology should be enabling and the ideal technology product doesn't involve learning any new technology at all. And in fact, it's even better if people don't realise they've learnt anything, and it's about the content or the aims of the actual project. So what we thought made a lot of sense was using the telephone infrastructures that everybody is already familiar with, and everybody knows how to use at this point, and harnessing it for a rather different purpose.

Antony Funnell: And this is not just helping the poor who can't afford computers or mobile technology, this also benefits people in villages who wouldn't have any use for a computer, because they're illiterate.

Rose Shuman: Exactly. The beauty of it is if you can talk and listen, and most people in the world do that, this is a perfectly appealing technology that really means that age and gender, literacy are no bar to using it at all.

Antony Funnell: The Question Box initiative has been under way in different parts of India since 2007, and in 2009 they began a pilot in Uganda in co-operation with the Grameen Foundation, which pioneered the idea of micro-finance. Rose Shuman again.

Rose Shuman: What it is, is it's about taking I think big, complicated concepts, like, say banking, in the micro-finance sense, or Internet communications in research, and really reconceptualising them down to a very simple and basic level in which you strip away everything that isn't necessary, and you're left with just the core, whether you're getting a loan to a villager, or giving information to a villager in the simplest manner possible.

Antony Funnell: So do you believe that we often make the mistake of trying to help the developing world with technology. As we do that, we forget that technology isn't a good in and of itself, that we shouldn't actually be focused too much on technology for its own sake.

Rose Shuman: I absolutely agree with that. And I think it's definitely true in the developing world, but also true even in the developed world. If you think about the litany of new technologies that come online every day now, I think that especially if you're a bit older, not always, but often, you're kind of tired of having to learn something new all the time. And so I think that it's a generally a good idea or a sort of universal design ideal, that technologies should be subordinate to human instincts, and to human logic, and that the most successful technologies I think, cut across what country you live in, and are really about making technologies analogous to something that's already in your life. So what I do mean by that? So for the Question Box, we put the green button and the red button, and the reason we chose that was that most everybody at that point had seen a mobile phone, and so they would know that the green button made and the call initiate, and the red button stopped the call. So therefore we figured people would be able to understand what the button means when moved on to our box. But if you don't put those linking or bridge points in there, technology quickly becomes very confusing and often has too many options. In the end you're frustrating people, no matter where you are.

Antony Funnell: Can I get you to give us an idea of the different sorts of questions that people have used Question Box for?

Rose Shuman: You know, I actually just pulled up on my computer a recent list of questions that schoolkids in our newest Question Box site have been asking. So these are what kids want to know at least, in Maharishi state. They want to know Mahatma Gandhi's date of birth/ place; they want to know who invented the mobile phone; they want to know how many bones in the human body; and they want to know what creates soil. Amongst other things.

Antony Funnell: What about people using it to help their business, to understand, say, cattle prices, or things like that - information that they perhaps wouldn't be able to get within their own village confine.

Rose Shuman: Yes, one thing that's been very valuable and a consistent and popular use in the non-school Question Box sites, has been an India produce prices. So what you have is small-holder farmers are very much at the mercy of middlemen. And middlemen know what the big market prices are and they buy the goods from the smallholder, and then truck it off to market, and make a usually pretty good profit. So what the farmers always want to know is what is that actual market price? Because if they know the market price, they can then negotiate with the middlemen, a much fairer price for their goods. So in a certain way, it's cut out a big inequality in the local markets and brought more resources to the actual person who does the farming.

Antony Funnell: Now this is a simple form of technology, but you are still reliant, aren't you, on things like Internet connections. Have those kind of things been a problem?

Rose Shuman: Well you know, in Uganda we actually did have trouble with Internet, so we worked around it. In Uganda, a good speed Internet connection at that point last summer was running $US500 a month, which is a staggering amount of money, particularly in Uganda, but anywhere. So what we did was we built a 3-tier system in which we put on our local computers as much information as we could, particularly about agriculture, so that if somebody called and it was in our database, then we could answer it right on the spot. If the Intranet was working, then they could get online and try to solve the problem that way. But if it didn't, we actually brought in an agricultural expert who would get all the questions every day and then return the answers, and then they would be able to call back to the different villages with the answer. So what we do is essentially we build flexible systems that let you solve the problem, no matter what the resources are at hand.

Antony Funnell: Rose Shuman, founder and CEO of Open Mind Question Box, thank you very much for talking with us.

Rose Shuman: Thank you, it's been a complete pleasure.

Antony Funnell: Now let's go back to Richard Heeks from the Centre for Development Informatics at the University of Manchester. We've already heard various figures concerning current technology usage in the developing world. But Professor Heek's and his team have been busy looking ahead, calculating Internet usage trends over the next five years. So what can he tell us about the near future?

Richard Heeks: We've still got quite a lag. We calculated what we called a digital lag which is how long will it take the poorest countries of the world to get where the richest countries of the world are today? And for mobile phones it's not too bad. If we take say, let's say 2005 as a sort of baseline, then the poorest countries of the world will in 2015 be where the richest countries of the world were in 2005. For the Internet, for Broadband, it's a longer lag. We're looking at more like 15 to 17 years, so it won't be until 2020, 2022, that the poorest countries are where we in the UK and Australia were even five years ago.

So it's a relentless process. It may seem fairly slow; the actual growth rates if you look at them are still pretty amazing, kind of 20% per year for the Internet, the poorest countries of the world still 50% per year increase in the number of mobile subscribers, these are still phenomenal rates, but particularly for the Internet, because it's from such a low base. I think it's still going to be maybe ten years at least before we can start thinking about the Internet being a real game changer in the way that mobiles are maybe arguably being at the moment.

Antony Funnell: One of the things that you've talked about is the importance of changing our view of the world's poor. That we have this view that they're passive consumers of information communication technology, and that we now need to start seeing them much more as innovators and producers. How significant do you think that sort of perception change really is?

Richard Heeks: I think if we look back to the year 2000, late 1990s, the biggest mistake that was made by governments, by companies, by development agencies, was they completely missed the mobile revolution. They were focusing on what are called telecentres, that's a little room with a few PCs that are Internet-connected. They thought that was going to be the model that developing countries were taking up. The reason they did that is because they completely misunderstood the world's poor. They thought the poor of the developing world were going to be like the people living in Australia, Europe and North America. If you looked at those people, they spent 3% of their income on telecommunication, so everybody said, Well the poor are going to be the same as everybody else. And 3% of their income is nothing very much at all. So there's really going to be no great demand for mobile phones in these developing countries. And we're only going to get the Internet in if we keep subsidising it. That proved to be completely incorrect. The poor will spend, it turns out, up to a quarter of their total income on telecommunications, up to three-quarters of their disposable income that is, their income if you remove the essentials like food.

So that lesson was really that these agencies, these governments, these companies had completely the wrong world view about the poor of the developing world. They saw them as not having, not needing, not using these new technologies. So what I'm arguing now is OK, now we've accepted that the poor are consumers of mobile telephony. Let's not make the same mistake for the next ten years ahead, and if we look at what's actually happening on the ground now, in poor communities is we find that we need to move beyond this kind of bottom of the pyramid mentality which said the poor are just fodder for the products and services of large companies. If we look actually on the ground, we find the poor being content-creative. Groups of women undertaking community radio programs; musicians making and sharing music digitally; we see the poor are workers in IT, they're involved in social outsourcing experiments where they're actually doing data entry work and digitisation work. We see them as entrepreneurs, an estimate of something like 3-million jobs, micro-enterprise jobs, have been created through mobiles in Africa, and we see them as innovators as well. They're starting to do new things within their communities with ICTs.

So I think all of those results, all of that evidence is really telling us we've got to once again move our view of the world's poor on not see them just as consumers, but start seeing them as workers, as entrepreneurs, as innovators, and see IT as enabling that.

Antony Funnell: Professor Richard Heeks, from the University of Manchester. Also on today's program were Kentaro Toyama, from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rose Shuman from the non-profit organisation called Open Mind. And go to our website if you'd like more details.

Next week, a conversation with the man who gave us the term 'digital native' - Douglas Rushkoff, the author of the new book Program, or be Programmed.

Douglas Rushkoff: I am advocating that we raise people with some knowledge of programming, the same way we think of it as important for kids to know basic math and long division and those sorts of thing. I think kids should also understand the very basics of programming, so that when they operate a computer, they don't think of it like a TV set. They don't think of the computer in terms of what it's come packaged with, but they think of a computer also as a blank slate. It's just like introducing kids to reading and writing, you know, you show them books, but you also give them blank pieces of paper where they could write their own words. You know, I feel like those few schools that do teach computers, teach kids not really computers, they teach them Microsoft Office, which is great for creating the office worker of the 1990s but not for creating the people who are going to build the 21st century.

Antony Funnell:Program or be Programmed next week on Future Tense. And if you're in Brisbane tonight, come and join me at the Gallery of Modern Art, where I'll be chairing a discussion entitled 'Who Are we in the World of Web 2.0?' It's the first in a series of free discussions organised by GoMA as part of their exhibition '21st Century - Art in the First Decade'. As I say, it's free, and it will be webcast live for people in other states. All the details are online.